From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Julius Caesar Scaliger.

Julius Caesar Scaliger or Giulio Cesare
della Scala (April 23, 1484 – October 21, 1558), was an
Italian scholar and physician spending a major part of his career
in France. He employed the techniques and discoveries of Renaissance humanism to defend Aristotelianism
against the new learning. In spite of his arrogant and
contentious disposition, his contemporary reputation was high,
judging him so distinguished by his learning and talents that,
according to Jacques August
de Thou, none of the ancients could be placed above him, and
the age in which he lived could not show his equal.

Contents

Biography

Scaliger's father, Benedetto Bordone, was a miniaturist and illuminator.[1]
Scaliger himself was known in his youth by the family name Bordone,
but later insisted that he was a scion of the house of La Scala,
for a hundred and fifty years lords of Verona, and was born in 1484 at the Rocca di Riva, on
Lake Garda.

When he was twelve, his kinsman the emperor Maximilian placed him
among his pages. He remained for seventeen years in the service of
the emperor, distinguishing himself as a soldier and as a captain.
But he was unmindful neither of letters, in which he had the most
eminent scholars of the day as his instructors, nor of art, which
he studied with considerable success under Albrecht
Dürer.

In 1512 at the Battle of Ravenna, where his father
and elder brother were killed, he displayed prodigies of valour,
and received the highest honours of chivalry from his imperial cousin, who
conferred upon him with his own hands the Order of the Golden Spur,
augmented with the collar and the eagle of gold. But this was the
only reward he obtained.

He left the service of Maximilian, and after a brief employment
by another kinsman, the duke of Ferrara, he
decided to quit the military life, and in 1514 entered as a student
at the University of Bologna. He
determined to take holy orders, in the expectation that he
would become cardinal, and then pope, when he would wrest from the Venetians
his duchy of Verona, of which the republic had despoiled his
ancestors. But, though he soon gave up this design, he remained at
the university until 1519.

The next six years he passed at the castle of Vico Nuovo, in Piedmont, as a guest of the Della
Rovere, at first dividing his time between military expeditions
in the summer, and study, chiefly of medicine and natural history, in the winter, until a
severe attack of rheumaticgout brought his military career to a close.

Henceforth his life was wholly devoted to study. In 1525 he
accompanied Antonio della Rovera, bishop of Agen, to
that city as his physician. Such is the outline of his own account
of his early life.

It was not until some time after his death that the enemies of
his son first alleged that he was not of the family of La Scala,
but was the son of Benedetto Bordone, an illuminator or
schoolmaster of Verona; that he was educated at Padua, where he took the degree of M.D.; and
that the story of his life and adventures before arriving at Agen
was a tissue of fables. It certainly is supported by no other
evidence than his own statements, some of which are inconsistent
with well-ascertained facts (see below).

The remaining thirty-two years of his life were passed almost
wholly at Agen, in the full light of contemporary history. They
were without adventure, almost without incident, but it was in them
that he achieved so much distinction that at his death in 1558 he
had the highest scientific and literary reputation of any man in
Europe. A few days after his arrival at Agen he fell in love with a
charming orphan of thirteen, Andiette de Roques Lobejac. Her
friends objected to her marriage with an unknown adventurer, but in
1528 he had obtained so much success as a physician that the
objections of her family were overcome, and at forty-five he
married Andiette, who was then sixteen. The marriage proved a
complete success; it was followed by twenty-nine years of almost
uninterrupted happiness, and by the birth of fifteen children who
included Joseph Justus Scaliger.

A charge of heresy in 1538,
of which he was acquitted by his friendly judges, one of whom was
his friend Arnoul Le Ferron, was almost the only event of interest
during these years, except the publication of his books, and the
quarrels and criticisms to which they gave rise. In 1531 he printed
his first oration against Erasmus, in defence of Cicero and the Ciceronians[2]. It is
a piece of vigorous invective, displaying, like all his subsequent
writings, an astonishing command of Latin, and much
brilliant rhetoric, but
full of vulgar abuse, and completely missing the point of the
Ciceronianus of Erasmus.

The writer's indignation at finding it treated with silent
contempt by the great scholar, who thought it was the work of a
personal enemy - Meander - caused him to write a second oration
(published in 1536), more violent and abusive, with more
self-glorification, but with less real merit than the first. The
orations were followed by a prodigious quantity of Latin verse,
which appeared in successive volumes in 1533, 1534, 1539, 1546 and
1547; of these, a friendly critic, Mark Pattison, is obliged to approve the
judgment of Pierre Daniel Huet, who says,
"par ses poésies brutes et informes Scaliger a déshonoré le
Parnasse"; yet their numerous editions show that they
commended themselves not only to his contemporaries, but to
succeeding scholars. A brief tract on comic metres (De comicis
dimensionibus) and a work De causis linguae Latinae
(Lyon, 1540; Geneva, 1580)[3], which
was the earliest Latin grammar founded on scientific principles and
following a scientific method, were his only other purely literary
works published in his lifetime.

His Poetices (Lyons, 1561; Leyden, 1581) appeared after
his death. With many paradoxes, with many criticisms which are
below contempt, and many indecent displays of personal
animosity—especially in his reference to Etienne Dolet, over
whose death he gloated with brutal malignity—it yet contains acute
criticism based on the Poetics of Aristotle,
imperator noster; omnium bonarum artium dictator
perpetuus[4], an
influential treatise in the history of literary
criticism. Like many of his generation Scaliger prized Virgil above Homer. His praise of the tragedies of Seneca
over those of the Greeks influenced both Shakespeare and Pierre
Corneille.

It is as a philosopher and a man of science however that
Scaliger meant to be judged. Classical studies he regarded as an
agreeable relaxation from severer pursuits. Whatever the truth of
the first forty years of his life, he had certainly been a close
and accurate observer, and had made himself acquainted with many
curious and little-known phenomena, which he had stored up in a
most tenacious memory.

His scientific writings are all in the form of commentaries, and
it was not until his seventieth year that (with the exception of a
brief tract on the De insomniis of Hippocrates) he felt that any of them were
sufficiently complete to be printed. In 1556 he printed his
Dialogue on the De plantis attributed to Aristotle, and in 1557 his
Exercitationes on Jerome Cardan's, De
subtilitate. His other scientific works, commentaries on Theophrastus' De
causis plantarum and Aristotle's History of Animals,
he left in a more or less unfinished state, and they were not
printed until after his death. They are all marked by arrogant
dogmatism, violence of language, a constant tendency to
self-glorification, strangely combined with extensive real
knowledge, with acute reasoning, with an observation of facts and
details almost unparalleled. But he is only the naturalist of his
own time.

That he anticipated in any manner the inductive
reasoning of the true scientific method cannot be
contended; his botanical studies did not lead him, like his
contemporary Konrad von Gesner, to any idea of a natural
system of classification, and he rejected with the utmost arrogance
and violence of language the discoveries of Copernicus. In metaphysics and in natural history
Aristotle remained as much a law to him as in poetics, and in
medicine Galen, but he was not a
slave to the text or the details of either. He thoroughly mastered
their principles, and is able to see when his masters are not true
to themselves. He corrects Aristotle by himself.

He is in that stage of learning when the attempt is made to
harmonize the written word with the actual facts of nature, and the
result is that his scientific works have only historical value. His
Exercitationes upon the De subtilitate of Cardan
(1551) is the book by which Scaliger is best known as a
philosopher. Its numerous editions bear witness to its popularity,
and until the final fall of Aristotle's physics it continued a
popular textbook. The Exercitationes are renowned for
their display of encyclopaedic wealth of knowledge, the vigour of
the author's style, and the accuracy of his observations; at the
same time, as Gabriel Naudé noted, they contain more
faults than those Scaliger has discovered in Cardan. Charles Nisard
wrote also that his object seems to be to deny all that Cardan
affirms and to affirm all that Cardan denies. Yet Leibniz and
Sir
William Hamilton recognize him as the best modern exponent of
the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle.

See also

References

Correspondents of Scaliger
Julius Caesar Scaliger was the father of Josephus Justus Scaliger
(1540-1609), who maintained a vast correspondence with European
humanists and scholars, whose names are listed
here.[[Category:Nostradamu